An innovative major in the College of Arts & Sciences is being expanded and refined to highlight its combination of science, social science and the humanities and its relevance to careers today.
The new major in science, technology and society offers students a combination of theoretical and practical classes and experiences, allowing students to work with real-world problems related to science and technology, viewing those problems through multiple lenses.
“We wanted to design a major that sets students up to be successful in an ever-changing world," said Malte Ziewitz, associate professor in the Department of Science and Technology Studies (STS) and director of the Digital Due Process Clinic. “Data centers, climate change, genome editing, voting technologies—none of these challenges are simply technical or scientific; they all require experts that can speak across boundaries, have serious analytical chops and have the judgment to make effective interventions.”
Students in the major will participate in a sequence of new classes, including a third-year practicum bringing policy experts from government and non-governmental organizations to campus.
“Students will work with these experts and write white papers on problems that need to be solved surrounding issues such as climate change, regulating AI or medical ethics,” said Prof. Suman Seth, Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow and Marie Underhill Noll Professor of the History of Science and the chair of STS (A&S). “We’ll leverage the enormous connections Cornell has to help students work out problems using all of the techniques that STS brings.”
Students in the major will focus on one of several areas: data and society; health and society; gender, sexuality and science; race, science and medicine; environment and society; mind, brain and artificial intelligence; or engineering, design and society.
“STS is an ideal major or double major for students who have interests in information science or computer science but also think socially about these issues,” Seth said. “The students who major in STS are ‘all-rounders’ who are highly sought after by employers.”
The field of science, technology and society has always pushed both academic and public boundaries, Ziewitz said, mentioning controversy analysis, for example. “When Dorothy Nelkin, one of the early scholars in the program, published ‘Nuclear Power and its Critics: The Cayuga Lake Controversy’ in 1971, she pioneered a methodology for analyzing scientific controversies that is still taught today; but she also tackled a real-world problem right around the corner," he said. "This rigor-plus-relevance is what has been distinguishing our students when they enter research, policy, advocacy, law or industry.”
Students in Ziewitz’s Digital Due Process Clinic have been conducting oral history interviews with people who have been falsely accused by automated systems of plagiarism, fraud and even crimes. Some of the stories are being turned into podcast episodes and used in teaching, he said.
Ella Hilliard ’26 said the major prepared her well for her first year of law school.
“I chose the STS major because the STS coursework is deeply interdisciplinary, centering on how science and technology intersect with topics in the arts, social sciences and natural sciences,” she said. “The major teaches students to critically analyze primary and secondary sources across diverse disciplines, an integral skill for understanding and applying legal reasoning.”
Students in the new major will also be encouraged to undertake a senior thesis, though that won’t be mandatory, Seth said.
“In our world today, we need people with the ability to think about what the world will look like in the future,” Seth said, “to think about what a global pandemic might look like in places where there’s a history of colonialism, how disasters affect people differently in areas where there’s been environmental racism.
“ ‘One size fits all’ has never worked, and especially not today in our global world."
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